Tuesday, Debtember 03, 2024
Ice ice baby
Last month the ice maker in our refrigerator broke. So I called the manufacturer and for a hefty price, they arranged for a local repair company to repair or replace the ice maker. About a week later, the technician showed up, failed to remove the broken unit, and decided that it needed replacing and would be back in a few days.
The following week the technician showed up again, bitched that we failed to answer his messages. I explained that I set my phone to have a silent default ring tone due to spam, and a default text tone of silence, again due to spam (and man, the amount of text spam I recieved from politicians during election season was staggering! Damn you policitians and exempting yourselves from spam laws! Damn you all to hell!). The technician was nonplussed and said I should do something about that. We gave him Bunny's phone number as she doesn't have a silent default ring tone.
The technician also realized he had the wrong model of ice maker. He said he would order yet another replacement and get back with us when he had the new ice maker. That was the week of Thanksgiving, so it wasn't too surprising that we didn't hear back that week.
Well, now it's the following week and we hadn't heard anything. But I failed to keep notes and didn't have a phone number of the actual company doing the work. Nor was I sure of the name of the company doing the work. The manufacturer had set this all up, so today I called the manufacturer to see what was going on.
Three times.
Twice my cell phone died because the battery isn't worth it anymore. And that's the replacement battery—the original battery wasn't worth it either. And each time, I had to start over with a new person, only to die just prior to any form of resolution. It was on the third call, using Bunny's phone, plugged into mains power to ensure her phone's battery didn't die on me, that I finally got the number to the company they contracted for work.
I then called the contractor company and was told that the work had been completed and accepted by us! If I wanted, I could make a new ticket to repair or replace our “new” ice maker, but the ticket was closed. Even when I told the representative that the technician failed to replace the ice maker, I was just told the work order was closed. I told them I wasn't going to pay the hefty price again and I was told to take that up with the warantee company, who paid them to do the work, which was done, by the way.
I called the manufacturer back, and this was a very surreal call. I explained the situation; they then called the contracting company (and I waited on hold for this), only to be told they were given the same story as I was given—the work was completed, the order is done. The representative had me check the ice maker and yes, I did find a serial number, model number and a lot number. I rattled off said information and the representative was surprised that we had apparently installed an ice maker from their competitor. I said it was the unit installed when we received the refrigerator and had been working for well over a year, but the representative said the model number just didn't match the model numbers they used. And as the contracting company refused to do anything, I was told I should probably dispute the charges with the credit card company.
I guess.
I have to wonder what happened … did the technician just close the wrong ticket? Just said “XXXX it, that couple was a pain to work with” and just lied? I don't know.
All I know is, we should have just used ice trays and foregone the ice maker.
